The Sea Change
by the same strange animal
Summary: Tegan and Sara. One shot/drabbles, but not in linear chronology.
1. Please tell me you found my wallet!

(Won't make much sense without this.: [tegan and sara tumblr] /post/4417100836/i-think-i-was-banished)

"PLEASE TELL ME YOU FOUND MY WALLET!"

Something is tacked on the door, but she can't see what. She stumbles forward but is not really interested in that. She comes up behind her and slips an arm around her waist to her front, fingers stopping underneath a ridge that she assumes is binding tape or a bandage. She's not sure; she doesn't understand these things and she's never asked and she's too drunk to stop herself from this movement. Facing the fridge and using her momentum from creeping up behind her, the alcohol surges through her veins and the action is pure inertia. It's not filtered out. She tips forward a little and comes to a stop, pressing herself against the back in front of her. Sara jerks her spine straight in response, then relaxes slightly. Still tense. But drunk, drunker than her possibly. She started earlier. She starts earlier these days. She's not sure whether that's a great thing, or an awful thing. Everything seems uncertain recently. She doesn't start or pull away, so they just stand there awkwardly for a long while, the room spinning slightly for both of them. The music in the other part of the house is loud. She can feel it through the floor. But it's quiet in here. Sara's breathing is slow and she knows this will only be a hazy memory in the morning. She takes a calculated risk and puts her chin on her shoulder. Flesh and jaw move slightly out the corner of her eye and she knows she's embarrassed and slightly uncomfortable, but that the tiny blurred change is a smile. She doesn't move her gaze to look at it. It'll break the moment. These 2AM minutes are sacred, they don't have to be talked about. They remain silently acknowledged, 'forgotten' under the veil of drinks and cigarettes. She's never been so grateful for a poison before. They've been happening more regularly lately. Something has shifted. She's not sure what. Sara feels thin under her half-hug, half-hold. She smells of Laphroaig and something else she can't quite put her finger on. Cleanliness. Her hair is getting longer. The part has changed. A wisp isn't perfectly pressed down and it tickles the side of her nose, the side Sara's half-smile is on. She can feel her heartbeat in her rib cage under her hand, through the layer of bandage. tick, tick, tick. Like a hummingbird trapped in a cage.

They stare at the cat picture from the stranger and breathe.


	2. I think I was banished

Emy's 30th birthday party in Montreal, referred to here: [tegan and sara tumblr] /post/4417100836/i-think-i-was-banished. So that would make this...before the previous chapter (chronologically). I wanted to know why Tegan has started sneaking up behind Sara and holding her when drunk, the way I imagined she did here: [youtube]/watch?v=Vrx8l1JYGGQ .

I THINK I WAS BANISHED.

If she concentrates on letting the warming liquid separate her past from her present, she can fall between the spaces. The careful wall disintegrates and she doesn't hear the last thing said in the casual party chatter.

She turns her face with faked attentiveness and allows herself to look. She just wants to touch her. That sounds wrong, as soon as she hears it in her head she recoils and grimaces at herself. Her stomach feels weird. Almost like butterflies. She wants to feel her? ew. But she _can_ clearly and vividly remember the feel of her limbs curled against her pajamed body when they would sneak into one another's rooms at night, usually when their parents were entertaining friends or Sonia would fall asleep on their stepfather's lap in front of a horror movie or some 80's risque show. She would play pretend she was one of them, and slip in beside Sara in her bed, looking around her room in the dark with dilated pupils, trying to make out the details. It was always much tidier than hers, even as children. Sara would pretend to be asleep usually, but it was an agreed-up on rouse and it wouldn't take long for Sara to giggle and wriggle under Tegan's hug and mold herself into the spoon, or roll onto her back and start a whispered conversation. Extra-close so she could feel her breath against her lips, lest they be overheard and get in trouble. The childish giddiness got them worked up all over again, sleep further away than ever. The rebelliousness! She felt so naughty.

What did they talk about? What do children talk about? School? Stories? Did they ever talk about adult things? The future? Their father and his absence? Tegan doesn't know. It's magically erased; the memory of these nights is tenuous and wavering like a reflection on the surface of water. Only the sensation is left behind, at once stronger than any other she can conjure up at a moment's notice. It was the _feel_; the warm and hairless little calf against her own, the pressure of her breathing moving her torso away from Tegan's chest, then back against it, then away. Steady, rhythmic. Her New Kids On The Block t-shirt, or when they were younger, the flannel of a little girl's floral nightie, would have ridden up in their excited rambling and wiggling. Tegan would be aware of an exposed patch of soft skin heated from the cuddle and the confines of the bed pressed against her own pale stomach. The back of her thin, curveless thighs hot against the front of hers. She resented her sleeping mother in the other room for the imposed separation of their twin rooms. She doesn't understand it's 3AM and she'll be ratty in the morning, as they always were when indulged in sleepovers. She just wants to feel safe like this forever. She imagines with wicked glee being big girls, in their own house and away from their mother's rules and not having to get up for school. She plans to swig coke straight out of the bottle and have McDonald's for dinner every night. She'll stay up as late as she wants, telling ghost stories to the back of Sara's delicate neck into the early hours of every morning. The innocence. And yet not; if she strains and ignores the butterflies Tegan can remember a stabbing pain imagining Sara falling asleep on her future husband in front of the late night movie, head in his lap. She can remember wondering how things worked as you got older, how the husband would feel when Tegan slipped into their warm bed behind her sister. It never occurred to her this would never happen. She felt bad only for the husband. Poor guy. How awful it must be to fall in love with a pretty girl like Sara and have to share her warm, delicious limbs with someone who got there long before you! She felt terribly sorry for him. Tegan's own husband never entered these fantasies, she realises now she never invented one. Sara was hers for the holding, she always had been and she always would be. This little being so like her, and yet so different at the same time. Nothing else that could possibly happen to her in her life worries her, she knows as long as she can fall asleep and wake up with her soul entwined, she will be whole. She smiles rapturously into the fine neck hairs and breathes in.

The blackberry flashes on the counter with a name she doesn't recognise and Sara answers. Tegan is wrenched up mercilessly through the depths to the present like a drowning child. She watches as she wriggles into the future embrace of another and slips away from her.


	3. A sea change

(read first: [teganandsaralover blogspot com au] 2011/ 01/ very-interesting-coup-de-main-interview. html )

**A Sea Change.**

She turns the post-it note over in her fingers, keeping her hand in the depths of the suitcase. One word scrawled on the opposite side: **_Strong._**

How long had Tegan kept this in here? Crumpled among the inexplicable crumbs and clothes lint, disappearing into the seaming as if swallowed by the object itself. Since...the interview? Since New Zealand?!

She straightens. She pretends she's had a few whiskeys and allows herself to notice Tegan as she busies around the room packing, her eyes settling on the back of her as she bends and lifts. If she's honest with herself, the working-out has done little. She still appears Rubenesque, fertile. She rolls her eyes inwardly and wonders where these words came from. She looks like she could be reclining on some 17th century chaise lounge with fruit, waiting to be painted, is what she means. Sara's borrowed skin-tight jeans only emphasize, not obscure this like Tegan hopes they do. But she still likes to tease her about it publicly, compliments secreted within. Never privately. Sara is high and hard and petite, even when she does nothing for it save walking everywhere. She _likes_ that they're so different, she wouldn't want Tegan to change. She looks down at her own transforming demeanor, and she wishes she could tell her this. But she doesn't have the words.

For years therapists tried to unpick the knot between them; tried to get Sara to open up and love being a twin. To share with her, not just her toys and friends and career like she was so good at (wasn't that enough?!), but _her_. Maybe then, and only then, would Tegan stop the desperate and rejected clinging. And she could finally stop resenting her. She could move back and they could live across the street from one another, making everyone comfortable again and the acute embarrassment and hurt go away. She just had to be more like Tegan, the correct way of being. Pragmatic, unconditionally undeterred by rejection, a force field of love. The regret rises like bile at her past self feeling smothered.

"Sooo...who's picking you up from the airport in New York?"  
The tone wafts over tentative and cutesy, but Sara isn't fooled. There's steel resolve in there, waiting for the inevitable rampart. She doesn't make her wait.  
"No one. just a friend." She lies, but there's a smile in her throat.  
"Mmhmm. cool."

Tegan single-handedly broke the cycle. She stopped clinging like a pathetic limpet and Sara stopped hacking at her...suckers or whatever it is limpets hold on with. She didn't have to change a single thing about her personality. Tegan changed for the both of them. Or maybe she didn't change at all, just became more of herself. Herself for Sara. A therapist would be appalled. They stopped seeing a therapist.

She bobs in the ocean perfectly upright like some sort of buoy, battered by the currents. Now she's strong enough that Sara feels she can swim out to her. As she has had to do lately, in a way. She turns into the bathroom and the light from the window catches her profile. Sara doesn't think she's ever seen her look more beautiful.

She lets the melancholy wash over her in waves.


End file.
